Re: [Groff] Eric Raymond on groff and TeX

[Mike Bianchi]

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 01:57:27PM -0400, Peter Schaffter wrote:
> > > I think esr is emphasizing (!) that in a structural-markup
> > > language the tags can have no typographic meaning whatsoever.  
> > 
> > Correct.  What Anton was considering unfair is the implication
> > that troff only does presentational markup
> 
> Which is patently untrue.

A point that think Eric would readily acknowledge.

But the first place most people encounter troff is by looking at the manual
pages.  Many of those are truly ancient and one just has to look at ed(1)
to see what he is referring to.
        gunzip < /usr/share/man/man1/ed.1.gz

And cause it is the model that people saw, for decades (and I know because I
was one of them) they just copied the form and function of what they saw.
After all, it was what everyone else did.

And anyone who grew up with WHAT-YOU-SEE-IS-ALL-YOU-GET text editors thinks
in the BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINE ... model as opposed to the COMMAND, ARGUMENT,
REQUIRED ... model.

-- 
 Mike Bianchi
 Foveal Systems

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